US Mint Proposes Savings that Amount to a Rounding Error on the Budget

American consumers have shown about as much appetite for the $1 coin as kids do their spinach. They may not know what’s best for them either. Congressional auditors say doing away with dollar bills entirely and replacing them with dollar coins could save taxpayers some $4.4 billion over the next 30 years.

Vending machine operators have long championed the use of $1 coins because they don’t jam the machines, cutting down on repair costs and lost sales. But most people don’t seem to like carrying them. In the past five years, the U.S. Mint has produced 2.4 billion Presidential $1 coins. Most are stored by the Federal Reserve, and production was suspended about a year ago.

That might be because the US dollar coins look so much like a brassy quarter that they confuse people. The lack of precious metals in them makes them less interesting to collectors and investors. The mint’s design error has made sightings of dollar coins in the wild about as frequent as sightings of Bigfoot popping the hood of a parked UFO.

At any rate, the savings we would get from switching to dollar coins have already been offset by the waste of creating the stockpile 2.4 billion dollar coins that no one wants, right? I bet they could move a bunch of dollar coins if they put Obama’s face on them, though.

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

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1.
Rob Crawford

There’d be more demand for paper bills with Obama’s face, especially if they were soft, absorbent, and came in rolls.

Actually, it’d make far more sense (no pun intended) to stop minting the penny. Canada recently did that. They just round the prices.

Pennies aren’t worth enough to bother with. It costs too much money to mint them, to ship them, and to count and roll them. They’re heavy and take up too much space in one’s pocket or coin purse. Stop minting pennies and save a ton of money!

I’m sorry, but with the fantasyland-scale waste and graft going on at this very moment, the prospect of 4.4 billion in savings spread out over the next 30 years just doesn’t get the heart racing. If we’re projecting in a 30-year timeframe, I’m much more interested in what country we’ll belong to and what it’ll be called. And if I’ll be able to speak the language.

I love how the new norm is to run all savings projections out for many years – usually 10 – but this one takes the cake for using 30 years! The original intent of using 10 year projections was to get a better handle on the future cost of proposed spending programs. Naturally, unintended consequences, and now it’s totally misused for political benefit – to obfuscate the real numbers. Just give me the yearly number or even next years numbers when we’re talking budgets. If its not next year, its not real.